Do you like Resident Evil
? Yes? What about Silent Hill
and Countdown Vampires
? Yeah, me too. Go out and buy this game and you will be happy. Now with that out of the way, let me explain to you why you'll need to stick it out in the beginning and not throw your controller through your TV set.
The beginning of this game is very hard and frustrating. Not immediately, but once you exit the cabin. After a nice long cutscene that sort of runs down what you have missed if you haven't seen any of the movies (as the game picks up after them), you begin your journey in Dr. Knowby's cabin. Basically, your girl just got kidnapped by Bad Ash and you have to save her. You also have to collect the pages of the Necronomicon (Book of the Dead, anyone?) that have been scattered throughout the different levels of the game. The thing is, this evil book is what allows the evil to haunt Ash and he needs the pages to stop the evil... or something evil like that. Anyway, along the way, you'll meet up with various 'deadites' and you'll have to either kill them or run away. Here's where the tough stuff starts. The first deadites you are introduced to are the legless, floating ones. They suck. They gang up on you and regenerate and take many hits to kill, so I suggest running away if you can and especially if there are more than 1. The thing is, you have your trusty chainsaw (with limited supplies of gasoline to power it) and you also have an axe and Knowby's pistol to start with. Further into the game, you'll pick up your good ol' boomstick and a rifle and upgrade parts to make these weapons even more deadly. When you kill an enemy, you can either hack away or shoot him or you can run him through with your chainsaw, use a one-liner and use the axe in a finishing move. When you do this, he usually leaves behind a large healthpack instead of a small one or nothing, so when you can, use the finishing move.
One problem was that sometimes I found that it wasn't altogether clear where I needed to go. The levels are large and interconnect and you can go back and forth between the many branching paths, so at times it was confusing. Also, it seemed that healthpacks were few and far between early on in the game, leading to lots of death. Once again, stick it out because it gets better. There are mushrooms growing in parts of the game and these can be changed to health or fuel with your converter once you get the needed reading materials, so that helps a lot.
But is it fun? A resounding Hell Yes. Anyone who digs fetch quests, wacky puzzles and killing sprees will find a good time here and the cheesy sarcasm of the whole Evil Dead theme makes it that much better. Evil Dead: Hail To The King is a 2 CD game, so there is gobs of gameplay here. I played it through to the end and was sad that I had finished it because I just had so much fun with it. That's not to say that it doesn't have it's issues, however, and I will cover these in Difficulty and Game Mechanics, but it's still good stuff.